Littlewood's law
Littlewood's law states that a person can expect to experience events with odds of one in a million at the rate of about one per month. It is named after the British mathematician John Edensor Littlewood.
It seeks, among other things, to debunk one element of supposed supernatural phenomenology and is related to the more general law of truly large numbers, which states that with a sample size large enough, any outrageous thing is likely to happen.
History
An early formulation of the law appears in the 1953 collection of Littlewood's work, A Mathematician's Miscellany. In the chapter "Large Numbers", Littlewood states:Littlewood uses these remarks to illustrate that seemingly unlikely coincidences can be expected over long periods. He provides several anecdotes about improbable events that, given enough time, are likely to occur. For example, in the game of bridge, the probability that a player will be dealt 13 cards of the same suit is extremely low. While such a deal might seem miraculous, if one estimates that people in England each play an average of 30 bridge hands a week, it becomes quite expected that such a "miracle" would happen approximately once per year.
This statement was later reformulated as Littlewood's law of miracles by Freeman Dyson, in a 2004 review of the book Debunked! ESP, Telekinesis, and Other Pseudoscience, published in the New York Review of Books: